During a Santa Clara City Council meeting last year, Councilmember Kevin Park gestured to a local business owner in the audience and started reading aloud from the illustrated book All My Friends Are Dead, about a dinosaur who’s still around, even though the other dinosaurs are extinct.

But Park altered the text to read “All My Friends Are Termed Out.” The message was menacing. The business owner was deeply engaged with the city and once had many allies on the council. But Park was reminding this man that Park and the current council majority disliked him and that his political allies had left, or would soon leave, the council. Park’s implied threat: Who would protect the business owner moving forward?

Conflict is all too common at city council meetings in California and elsewhere. The council in our state’s largest city, Los Angeles, was so discredited by federal corruption investigations and a racist tape that your columnist suggested that it be disbanded. But it may be hard to top Santa Clara’s council for its rudeness and incompetence.

That, at least, is the conclusion of an extraordinary public document on the council, produced in June by the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury, which includes an account of Park’s dramatic reading. In California, such grand juries of regular citizens convene for a year to investigate local government. The Santa Clara grand jury’s report, titled “Irreconcilable Differences,” offers dozens of examples of just how nasty things can get in our city halls.

This report, based on more than 40 interviews and reviews of four years of council meetings, finds that “several Councilmembers have turned public meetings into spectacles by displaying abusive and belittling behavior from the dais towards members of the public; by political grandstanding, pontificating, and digressing from City business; by exhibiting a serious misunderstanding of parliamentary procedures; and by performing outlandish antics, such as reading from a satirical cartoon book.”

Much of this nasty political football is the product of actual football. The San Francisco 49ers relocated to a new home stadium in Santa Clara in 2014. Hopes were high that the team would boost the finances and spirits of this city of approximately 129,000.

Instead, the 49ers, while winning on the field, have been the local franchise from hell, angering many city residents and officials. The stadium is an uninspiring and undistinguished venue. The team’s promises that the building would be paid for privately proved untrue; the project required a new hotel tax and a public entity to take on about $600 million in construction loans. There have also been disputes about traffic, a local soccer field that the 49ers used for parking, and the team’s financial disclosures to the city.

The 49ers responded to fierce local criticism first with litigation, then by spending millions to unseat councilmembers who didn’t toe the line. The 49ers came to control a council majority that is known locally as the “49er Five.” But the team’s power in City Hall has poisoned relationships between the council and community members, city staff, and the mayor, who remains a critic of the team.

The new grand jury report is only the latest documentation of the awful dynamic. Two years previously, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury released a report, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” criticizing the council’s “lack of transparency, unethical behavior, and a lack of fiduciary responsibility regarding the Stadium.” Back then, the jury identified “repeated instances of councilmembers behaving acrimoniously and disrespectfully toward each other, City staff and the public… causing severe dysfunction in the City governance.”

Typically, when a county grand jury issues a report about a city, a city council will respond substantively, accepting some criticism and pushing back on others. But the Santa Clara City Council rejected the findings in their entirety and attacked the 2022 grand jury in conspiratorial tones. They ignored constructive suggestions, like creating a strong ethics committee to oversee the council (there is an ethics committee now, but the report says it is toothless).

One pro-49ers councilmember, Anthony Becker, reportedly leaked the grand jury report to the 49ers before its release. In 2023, Becker was indicted for the leak and lying about it; the case is still pending.

Since then, the council’s behavior has gotten worse, the 2024 grand jury report found. Arguments about small things are never-ending; on one occasion, the council spent two hours arguing over whether the mayor could send a note on city letterhead. The new grand jury report claims that the council can’t follow the most basic rules of order. They ignore the gavel when the mayor tries to quiet councilmembers and move on with the agenda.

The report questions whether councilmembers actually know the basics of governance or public meetings—or ignore them. Councilmember Park regularly speaks about items not on the agenda and interrupts votes by speaking after the closing of discussion. Councilmember Becker, who has remained in office even as he is prosecuted, makes motions before agenda items have been discussed or deliberated. And Councilmember Raj Chahal abstains from votes without legal basis, the report says

The councilmembers spend so much time fighting and snickering that they seem confused about the actual business. In an August 2022 meeting depicted by the grand jury, city staff presented councilmembers with four options for replacing a collapsed concrete wall that had been damaged by city trees. Staff had spent a year meeting with residents to come up with the plans. But the council, even after hours of briefing and discussion, was too confused to choose an option. With no path forward, the city manager and city attorney at the time instructed residents to file a claim against the city; the eventual settlement cost more than options negotiated by city staff.

Polls show the public has soured on the council and the city. And with good reason. While Santa Clara’s budget goes into deficit and its infrastructure languishes (the city is decades behind on capital improvements and a swim center was closed for safety reasons), the council is consumed by argument. A favorite tactic of the 49er Five, and their critics, is to investigate each other by filing Public Records Act requests, seeking records of their opponents’ conversations and communications. In this paper war, the city has received as many as 90 public record requests in one day, the grand jury found.

Councilmembers hurled unfounded accusations at the police chief and his family, then asked voters to change the position, currently elected, to a council-appointed post. Last year, voters rejected the change, choosing the chief over the council.

The grand jury blames the constant council conflict for long and exhausting meetings that extend well past midnight, low morale among city employees, and the discouragement of volunteerism and public participation among the general public. Its reports recommend that councilmembers attend trainings and establish an independent ethics commission.

Some councilmembers have suggested the grand jury findings are political, or aimed at the 49ers. But the council has said it will respond to the report by September 10.

Will they change their behavior? Don’t hold your breath. Indeed, the most damning of the new report’s findings is its recitation of all the residents who have asked the council to examine its own behavior and work to rebuild trust.

The council ignores these requests, the grand jury report found.

“Under current rules,” says the report, “Councilmembers have the sole authority to examine and police their behavior, a task they have proven themselves unwilling to do.”

The post Is This the Most Dysfunctional City Council in California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I hereby propose a new rule to improve the quality of California’s local democracy. When the bars in your city close, so must your city council.

The idea occurred to me while watching recent Santa Monica City Council meetings, including one gathering so long (nine hours plus) and so full of nonsense and hate (from hundreds of public commenters) that it could make you reconsider your support for free speech and self-government.

The bars had shut at 2 a.m., but the council was still going, groggily, at 3:30 a.m. when it logged its latest late-night failure: canceling plans to organize a representative assembly of city residents to help decide the future of its airport. The vote came after a couple of hours of public testimony from residents who spewed misinformation about such democratic processes (which are common in cities around the world). Their ramblings on old ballot measures, capitalism, and interest group power could only make sense at such a late (or rather, early) hour.

Alas, this sort of decision-making is to be expected in Santa Monica, which takes perverse pride in meeting agendas that run longer than the U.S. Constitution, and in sessions so long they exceed the length of a legal work shift (one recently clocked in at 10-and-a-half hours). Residents and councilmembers waste a considerable amount of that time listening to off-point rants, or arguing about the lengths of the meeting themselves.

Long meetings are also a defect of councils in other California political hothouses—from Huntington Beach, where conservative culture war battles extend meetings into the late night, to Richmond, where the council recently stayed up past 1 a.m. to endorse the Palestinian side in the Gaza war. Perhaps the late hours explain why such cities are so politically out there; researchers at UC Berkeley (located in another city with a history of late council meetings) have found that the sleep-deprived brain is more risk-taking and extremist.

But even less politicized cities fall into the long meetings trap when they start sessions in the evening, controversies intrude, and more and more speakers show up. City councilmembers end up debating and taking votes at hours when they should be home in bed.

The pandemic-prompted switch to remote meetings has contributed to the problem, since more residents make public comments when they can do so from home.

There are ways to avoid going so late. Some councils start meetings early in the afternoon, and begin with a closed session to get work done before bringing in the public at 5 or 6 p.m. Many councils have cut the length of time members of the public can speak—from the old-school five minutes down to three, two or one. A few councils have even applied speaking limits on the councilmembers themselves.

In some places, however, such limits are not enough, and councils have adopted curfews. San Jose’s city council established a midnight curfew back in 2017. Other councils require members to agree to let a meeting go past a certain hour—11 p.m. is common.

As a frequent attendee of council meetings, both in California and around the world, I’d suggest the problem is structural: We pack too many things into these gatherings.

Council meetings serve two essential but very different purposes. First, they are business meetings of a city, which is essentially a corporation. Second, they are democratic events where people make their voices heard and perform politics.

We’d be better off if we separated those two functions. Cities should have short and formal “business meetings” to make decisions they’re legally required to make—on budgets, hiring, and contracting. But, before making such decisions, councils should have separate gatherings, both in-person and online, devoted to getting real input—and not three-minute rants—from citizens.

The 21st century provides new ways to do this. Local governments around the world use participatory processes that allow citizens not just to weigh in on council decisions, but to set budgets and write laws themselves. Madrid and more than 100 other cities have created online environments in which everyday people can become co-creators of policies.

If you’re a night owl who loves the late-night council meetings of Santa Monica, there’s an invention for you, too. More than 50 cities around the world, including Montreal, Amsterdam, and Bogota, have started some form of “night councils,” governing bodies that meet late and tend to focus on problems that affect cities after dark.

Santa Monica would benefit from reforms like these, because the city’s longest meetings tend to produce head-scratching decisions. For example, municipal watchers around California have long puzzled at Santa Monica’s decision to launch an expensive, years-long, and mostly losing fight against voting rights lawsuits that demanded the city switch from at-large to district elections. Almost all other California cities and school boards have settled such lawsuits cheaply and quickly. When I asked a former Santa Monica official why they fought so long in a case one local calls “Bleak House on the Beach,” he said the city had made too many decisions on the litigation late at night.

Former Santa Monica Councilmember Bobby Shriver has complained publicly that when he tried to recruit more diverse candidates to serve on the body, they often turned him down, citing the length of the meetings.

“It seems that every meeting of the Santa Monica City Council there’s a debate or controversy caused by how darned long the meetings are,” wrote Damien Newton, the executive director of the Southern California Streets Initiative, which publishes nonprofit news site Santa Monica Next. “These meetings are bad for Democracy… The current process makes it difficult or even impossible for normal people to give comments at meetings and the late hours are bad for the Councilmembers themselves.”

The fault lies not just with overly talkative politicians but with the public itself. One evening earlier this year, the council cut off public comment on its very first agenda item after five hours—the item was, ironically, a proposal to regulate overnight noise. But the Santa Monicans attending the meeting refused to go along. Instead, more than 40 people stuck around to speak on the motion to end public comment. Councilmembers, stymied, gave up and ended the meeting.

The bad news: the council failed to conduct business on an agenda that included an emergency ordinance, a proposal for downtown housing, and, of course, rules for meeting participation.

The good news: the meeting ended before 11 pm—early enough for councilmembers to stop for a drink on their way home.

The post Go to Sleep, My City Council appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s time that we Californians censure the whole idea of censure.

Because it’s consuming the precious time and money of our local governments.

Censure is the name often given to resolutions or declarations that officials issue against someone—typically a colleague who doesn’t vote with you, and who has said something you don’t like. It is usually ceremonial, and rarely involves any additional punitive action.

Why this censure surge? It’s a national fad, of sorts—censure resolutions are suddenly popular in Washington after the censure earlier this year of Burbank Congressman Adam Schiff for the unforgivable crime of impeaching an insurrectionist president. It also doesn’t help that state officials—understandably frustrated with conservative school boards over transphobic policies and book bans—have sought to make it easier to censure local officials.

But my own travel around the state suggests three fundamental reasons for the trend.

First, after the isolation and anger of the pandemic, our elected officials, like the rest of us, are struggling with how to relate to one another in person.

Second, California’s local elected officials—rendered weak by the state’s highly centralized governing system—are feeling especially powerless to make the systemic changes that the moment demands. So, they use the limited powers they have, like censure.

Finally, today’s censure surge reflects a monstrously myopic society that has a quasi-religious obsession with policing expression and tone—even as it tolerates ceaseless violence.

Troublingly, the censure surge demonstrates ignorance of democracy. Many elected officials are finding themselves censured by colleagues for doing what we should want our leaders to do in a free society—speak their minds, dissent forcefully, and fight for transparency.

Censure isn’t always morally wrong. But it’s almost always beside the point—in no small part because it has no legal force behind it. It’s a simple business to say “Bad dog!” to a colleague who barks wrong. It’s much harder to do the democratic work of recalling them from office.

Take the Los Angeles City Council, which made a great show of censuring three colleagues caught on tape in a racist conversation that offended almost every demographic in town. Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson defended the censure, proclaiming that “these comments are unacceptable to us and that we disassociate ourselves from them as a body.”

But if the council had wanted to make a substantive response, it could have embraced a charter reform to completely redesign a body that, between the tape and rampant corruption uncovered by the FBI, has lost all credibility. Instead, councilmembers chose a censure with no real consequences. One councilmember, who had made the worst remarks on the tape, resigned almost immediately after the audio was leaked. A second councilmember ignored the censure and left at his term’s end. A third councilmember remains in office.

At least in the L.A. case, the censure had something to do with words that were clearly damaging. It’s far more common for censure to target officials who communicate in productive ways.

In California, local governments routinely handle important personnel decisions and contract negotiations—with huge consequences for residents—in closed session, and never publicly disclose details. In California City, in the Kern County desert, Councilmember Karen Macedonio was censured earlier this year for texting a candidate for city manager to apologize for the way he had been treated in a closed session.

She shouldn’t have revealed details of the deliberations, critics said. But accounts suggest that the real reason Macedonio was censured is that she stood at odds with the three-member majority on the five-person council. Dissenters are typical censure targets.

Indeed, while American democracy is premised on free exchange, especially in public settings, censures often target speech by elected officials in public meetings. For example, Councilmember Mike Johnson of Ventura faced censure for criticizing two city staff members during a council meeting. The staffers complained that being called out in public constituted bullying.

Such censures have real costs, in time and money. Ventura spent $75,000 of taxpayer money hiring a law firm to investigate words uttered in front of the council itself. Preposterously, the details of this investigation of public words are being kept secret, as a personnel matter.

While speaking in public can get you censured, real criminal offenses by elected officials rarely draw censures because they are handled by the criminal justice system. The Los Angeles City Council didn’t censure member Curren Price after federal charges were filed against him. In the same vein, the city council in Winters, in Yolo County, declined to censure a councilmember facing charges related to his possession of two AR-15 rifles.

It’s far more likely for officials to face censure for basic acts of democracy. In the Orange County city of Cypress, councilmember Frances Marquez was censured and fined $100 last fall for the grave offense for going to the local high school with two other city council candidates and talking to students about politics. Marquez even offered some students a chance to volunteer for her campaign, to fulfill community service requirements.

Marquez, a frequent dissenter on the council, had previously been censured for—you guessed it—making public information from the council’s closed sessions.

Unfortunately, keeping the children of Cypress safe from even a whiff of political campaigning may have real costs. Marquez’s lawyer has threatened a defamation and slander lawsuit against the city. That money might be better spent on a civics course for councilmembers; the $100 fine against Marquez for political expression is a First Amendment violation any high schooler could recognize.

To support censures, cities and school boards often cite the provisions of their own codes of conduct, which typically read as if they were written for elementary schools, not democratic governments.

After the city council in Seaside, in Monterey County, considered censure of one councilmember for criticizing his colleagues for not doing more on downtown revitalization, the city drafted a new code of conduct that declared, impossibly, “At all times, representatives of the City are to be courteous and polite to each other, and everyone they meet.”

Such rules are antithetical to the best advocacy and activism, which are often loud and conflict-inducing. The late, great Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of a president and mother-in-law of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, once gave me a T-shirt reading, “Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History.”

There are signs that the excesses of the censure surge are forcing a reappraisal. But attempts at what I’ll call “censure reform” can be as ludicrous as censures themselves.

According to the Daily Post, city councilmembers in Palo Alto this summer proposed reforming the censure procedure in order to reserve it for serious matters. Under the proposal, censure would require a super-majority vote, a procedure for council members to defend their behavior, and a choice between three different tiers of censure for different actions.

Maybe Palo Alto is comfortable enough to waste time on such nonsense. But most California communities don’t have that luxury in these apocalyptic times.

So, here’s a suggestion to local officials. Take the time you’re wasting on censures, and spend it visiting with colleagues in other local governments. Together you could develop a constitutional amendment to increase the power of local governments, so you can apply yourselves to things that really matter.

The post I Hereby Censure the Censure appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This summer, two of our state’s most thoughtful mayors, Sam Liccardo of San Jose and Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, have been seeking to make themselves “strong mayors.” The term refers to a system where mayors have executive authority, and can hire and fire department heads, sign budgets, or even veto council legislation.

“Strong mayors” are rare in California; only five of our 482 incorporated cities have them. More typically, California cities are run by appointed city managers, and a mayor is just one member of a city council. And in the Golden State, our city councils are weak and have few members.

Ordinarily, politicians’ desire for more power isn’t news. But the current crises over COVID-19 and policing have created urgency around the debate. Constituents, understandably, are demanding swift action from mayors on the pandemic and policing. But Liccardo, Steinberg, and other mayors complain that they can’t meet such public demands because they lack the necessary mayoral authority. So Liccardo is pursuing a “strong mayor” charter reform for San Jose, and Steinberg is backing a “strong mayor” measure on Sacramento’s November ballot.

Both men would be wise to drop the idea, at least for now. And not just because the “strong mayor” idea has caused political conflict at a time when their cities, and the whole state, desperately need unity. The larger problem is that creating a single powerful leader won’t make California cities any stronger.

Our cities’ lack of power is a function of our state’s constitution, which centralizes power in the state government and severely limits the most important local power—the power to raise taxes. That’s why even our state’s handful of “strong mayors” like L.A.’s Eric Garcetti frequently bemoan their lack of power, often while begging for state help. If Liccardo and Steinberg do succeed in becoming “strong mayors,” they’ll be little more than small cypress trees in a vast municipal desert.

Voters imposed this weak local system through Proposition 13 and many related measures because they don’t trust their local officials. Which means that the only way for city governments to change this system and become stronger is to build trust with voters.

You don’t build trust by trying to turn mayors into tin-pot Trumps. You build trust by making local governments more responsive and representative. But how can a local government be responsive and representative if there are barely any representatives in local government?

It can’t. Which is why the first step toward meaningful representation is to allow city councils to have many more members.

California is a huge state with very small local elected bodies. In no other state are local elected officials so few, and thus so far from the people. Our most populous cities, in particular, have tiny councils.

San Jose, with more than 1 million people, has just 11 council members. Sacramento has nine for more than 500,000, and San Diego is even worse, with nine for its 1.4 million-plus residents. No place is less representative than L.A., with just 15 council members for more than 4 million people.

Such minimal representation means not just that our representatives are further from us and harder to talk to. It also means there are simply too few elected positions to reflect the kaleidoscopic diversity of California and its communities. With so few local representatives, there are fewer of the ideas that our city governments so desperately need.

If you look to some of the globe’s greatest cities, you are likely to see large and energetic city councils. The city council of Madrid, Spain, has 57 members, and might be the world’s most innovative, having created an online “Decide Madrid” platform for citizen ideas that has been copied by more than 100 local, regional, and national governments around the planet.

Vienna, a pioneer in using local democracy to foster housing and development, has 100 representatives in its local parliament. Paris, perhaps the world’s most beautiful city, has 163. Tokyo, among the most energetic and creative urban places on earth, has 127 councilpeople. Seoul, a leader in citizen engagement and participation, has 110. Some creative cities guarantee more representation by dividing themselves up into boroughs; Mexico City, for example, has 16 separate municipalities.

If California cities wanted to follow suit right now, they’d have to find many more candidates for office. If L.A. had a city council where each member represented 25,000 people—a good number to make our politicians truly representative of their neighborhoods—the body would have 160 members, the same as in Berlin, Germany. By the same formula, San Jose would have 41 councilmembers, and Sacramento 21.

But it wouldn’t be as hard to identify new local politicians as one might think, especially now. The thousands of people marching on our streets are the sort of civic-minded folks we need more of in local office.

Mayors Liccardo and Steinberg also might find candidates for expanded city councils in San Jose and Sacramento among the many activists and inside the many nonprofits and labor unions opposing their “strong mayor” plans.

Tellingly, the debates over “strong mayor” plans in those two cities surfaced complaints about a lack of representation.

In Sacramento, Steinberg modified his original plan in response to community and political opposition. He also paired his November “strong mayor” measure with provisions that are supposed to ensure more equity and representation in the development of city policy.

In San Jose, Liccardo backed off plans for a “strong mayor” ballot measure this November in response to objections from neighborhood groups, ethnic organizations, and Latino members of the city council. Liccardo instead announced he would pursue an inclusive charter revision process, with a vote on a broad package of reforms in 2022.

“In recent weeks, several organizations have urged that we slow the process of charter reforms designed to lead to a more effective, accountable, and representative government,” Liccardo wrote in a memo announcing the delay. He added: “At the end of the day, our city belongs to its residents.”

It does. Which is why more residents should be in office. With more of our neighbors campaigning for council, Californians would be more likely to pay attention to, and vote in, our local elections.

California mayors might also find that, with more colleagues and a more engaged citizenry behind them, they have more power.

The post Madrid Has 57 Councilmembers. Seoul Has 110. Why Does L.A. Have 15? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The incident itself was ugly enough, but the subsequent debate proved just as bad. Many Ventura residents expressed disgust with the city’s inability to deal with people they regarded as vagrants, while many others expressed disgust that their friends and neighbors could dehumanize homeless people as part of the debate.

In the middle of this nasty fight sat seven people doing their best to make Ventura a better place to live: the members of the Ventura City Council. Sitting on the dais in the council chambers in the city’s historic 105-year-old city hall was not a comfortable place to be. Governing at the local level in California is always fraught with peril because people often have contradictory moral visions about what their city government should do—a fact that is obvious in most city council chambers every week. “We’re mad as hell. We’re not going to take anymore,” one resident told the councilmembers in a room packed full of angry folks.

The Ventura homelessness debate may yet work out—there’s a growing consensus to move forward with a new shelter—but the sense of being under fire will continue for local elected officials. It is inescapable: You’re elected by the small minority of residents who bother to vote in local elections. You devote yourself to a 24/7 job that pays a few thousand dollars a year. You try to do the right thing. But whatever you do, lots of your longtime friends and neighbors will be angry with you—and will express that anger to you in deeply personal terms in the supermarket, at parks and schools and churches, and even in parking lots.

I used to be a member of the Ventura City Council, and four of my former colleagues still serve there. They had to weather the recent controversy over the homeless. In my view, there’s no question that serving as a local elected official in California has gotten a lot harder over the past decade or two.

Just like our national conversation, our local debates have gotten harsher and uglier. Increasingly, we have seen deep divisions not only over local issues but also over national issues that manifest themselves locally, such as the recent debate about providing sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.

And, mirroring what’s happening at the national level, the ability to get things done locally has gotten much more difficult. Local politics is getting more ideological and the divisions in every city are getting starker. I called my recent book—an account of my time on the Ventura City Council—Talk City because sometimes it seemed to me like that’s all we ever did. And over time I felt we drifted away from productive talk that moved us toward action and instead spent more time talking past each other without taking any action.

Partly, this inability to get things done is the result of the growing disconnect between the expectations of our voters and their willingness to pay for those expectations. In California, that is a disconnect that goes back 40 years to the passage of Proposition 13.

On the one hand, people expect our city to do everything. Ventura is an old-fashioned “full service” city, which must provide police, fire, parks, water, sewer and more. Very often the city is the only local institution with the scale and revenue to initiate any large-scale undertaking.

On the other hand, most people don’t vote in local elections; turnout in off-year local elections typically runs between 25 percent and 35 percent. The voters are deeply skeptical of the city government’s competence; and during my terms they regularly voted down tax increases and tied the city’s hands on policy decisions via other ballot initiatives.

At a May 7, 2018 meeting at Ventura City Hall, supporters of more programs for homeless citizens held blue placards while those asking for more police enforcement held orange ones. Photo courtesy of Tim Nafziger.

Sometimes we couldn’t even agree on what to call our city. The official name is “San Buenaventura,” named for our mission, which was in turn named for St. Bonaventure, the 13th-century Catholic saint. (St. Bonaventure was a Franciscan, as was St. Junipero Serra, father of the California mission system.) That name had been shortened to “Ventura” in the 19th century, supposedly because the full name was too long to fit on the railroad schedules. Yet we never quite decided what to call ourselves—even our wayfinding signs said Ventura in some locations and San Buenaventura in others. In the middle of a heated debate on this topic one night, one of our longtime city councilmembers said, “We should use San Buenaventura on all of our signs so everybody knows they’re in Ventura.”

Luck of the draw made me mayor of Ventura during the depths of the last recession. I was the guy who closed a library and a fire station. We couldn’t meet expectations, and that, frankly, is when local politics got uglier than it had been before.

During the recession, I had conversations with constituents almost every day who told me that we shouldn’t cut their library service/fire station/park/senior citizen program. When I would ask them what we should cut instead, their typical reaction was: “I don’t know. That’s your job.”

In my experience, I am sorry to say, I now see the beginnings of the coarse, cynical, and occasionally cruel way that even ordinary people approach politics today.

One early manifestation of this was the Tea Party, which emerged in 2009 just when I began my stint as mayor. As the city contemplated a ban on single-use plastic bags, I was inundated by emails from members of the then-new Tea Party—some longtime friends, some out-of-towners I did not know—claiming that we were going to strip our residents of a precious freedom. A disagreement on policy is one thing, but one correspondent declared—in the subject line of his email—“Give me plastic bags or give me death!”

Not long afterward, the Tea Party and some other similarly minded folks came out in force to oppose our decision to install paid parking in some parts of downtown Ventura. I viewed this move as a market-oriented solution to a serious problem: Too many people parked on Main Street, while not enough people parked in the parking lots a half-block away. But the Tea Party folks viewed it as an unconstitutional exercise in double taxation. John and Ken—conservative shock-jock radio hosts in Southern California—spent an hour excoriating “the stupid city of Ventura and their dumbass mayor Bill Fulton.”

The budget situation is better now and my former colleagues have been able to do some good things as a result. But the tinge of meanness has remained, just as it has at the national level. John and Ken were back in Ventura broadcasting from the Promenade after the recent homeless/murder incident.

Those are the kinds of experiences that make you wonder why anybody would run for office. Indeed, whenever anybody asks me whether I think they should run for their local city council, the first thing I always ask is, “Are you crazy enough to do it?”

It’s not surprising under these circumstances that not many good people want to run for office in California these days—and I’m not sure there are many systemic changes that could improve the situation. A recent state law that will switch many local elections from odd to even years will at least increase turnout—which may help people feel more invested in their elected officials. Better pay might help, so that people don’t have to retire or go bankrupt to serve. But maybe the most important thing is simply to help people see political and civic life in their town as a shared effort that includes not just the elected officials but everybody else as well.

As mayor I used to attend a different church service every Sunday, and at one social hour after a service I was approached by a man in his 30s wearing all black with several tattoos. He was accompanied by his wife and daughter, both of whom were dressed in all black with heavy dark makeup.

“Mayor Fulton,” he said, “I just wanted to say we love what you’re doing. We are so excited about where Ventura is going.”

I thanked him in a perfunctory way, and he added: “We were wondering—how can the Goth community get more involved?”

I’m not sure we ever got the Goth community deeply involved in Ventura’s political life. But that’s where the hope lies: When ordinary people from various backgrounds are inspired to step out of their own world and into the wider world of civic involvement.

The post The National Partisan Nastiness Is Now Poisoning Local Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But South L.A. has a way of surprising you.

The growth and success we’re experiencing are raising new questions for residents and businesses alike. For example, how do we continue to grow and still preserve what we have? How do we attract new businesses so residents can access conveniences in their own community? And at the same time, how do we make sure that the local mom-and-pop businesses that have been part of our growth don’t get pushed out by the likes of CVS (coming soon) or Trader Joe’s (rumored)?

I’m sensitive to the concerns of the mom and pops, because I am the mom in one—as were my mom and my grandmother.

My parents, Alice and Horace Bowers, purchased Smith’s Cleaners from my mother’s parents in 1950 and renamed it. Originally it was on the corner of Westlake Avenue and Temple Street in the Westlake District, and it grew quickly, though the cleaning was done by a subcontractor.

In 1964, my parents purchased a small dry cleaning plant at 2507 South Central Avenue. Bowers & Sons then became a “full service” cleaning operation servicing downtown Los Angeles and surrounding areas from two locations. The Bowers’ served retail and wholesale clients and provided pickup and delivery services. As the business grew, my parents purchased an adjoining building (2509) for expansion. Eventually, they bought the entire block of storefronts on the 2500 block of Central Ave., now Bowers Retail Complex.

Like many families who own their own business, my brothers and I worked at the store. Each of us has held the helm of the ship! We’ve succeeded because we’ve adhered to the business philosophy coined by my parents—“We Care Enough to Add A Personal Touch.” We’ve also maintained the cornerstones of our business—professionalism, quality, reliability, and affordability. Additionally, we believe in being good stewards of our community and giving back to people in need and to community causes. My parents were always there to give financial, business, and even family advice, assistance or employment. My dad would often hire the men down on their luck to do general maintenance, like sweeping, mopping, or painting.

Still, I wanted my own life and career. I married and had two sons, now wonderful young men. For over 20 years I worked in retail sales and management and then as an account executive at Kaiser Permanente, where I earned a good salary, full benefits, and five weeks annual vacation.

In 1994, my parents decided to retire. My dad wanted to close the doors and sell, unless one of their children would take over the plant. Neither of my brothers, who both managed the plant previously and were well into their desired careers—one was a writer, the other an actor-singer-performer—wanted to take it over. Nor did I.

Vivian Bowers-Cowan at Bowers & Sons Cleaners.

Alas, I decided I couldn’t stand the idea of the building going into decline and adding to the community’s blight. My thinking was this: If my parents had succeeded and stood the test of time, I would also. Besides, I’d always enjoyed working in the community and providing a good service.

Many people asked me why would I take over a business in South Central and give up my career. I answered, why not?

I was a single mother, and it was 1994—just two years after the riots—and the neighborhood was having a rough time. My sons, who had worked at the store, asked me not to take over the business, saying it was dangerous and “We’d starve!” But I felt the community consisted of good, hardworking people who deserved professional service. So, I put my faith in God, in the family’s reputation as pillars of the community, and in our location’s proximity to downtown, freeways, and USC. It’s a timeless truth that people will always need to get their clothes cleaned.

Because this was post-riots, I essentially took on two, related struggles—one for the business, the other for the neighborhood. In those first years, I saw drive-by shootings, drugs, and prostitution. At one point I thought about installing bullet-proof glass!

Initially, we had only three employees and there were days the business made little more than $200. I wanted to develop a business plan, and my search for help led me to the Rebuild L.A. program, which referred me to USC’s Business Expansion Program. I completed the Fast Trac II entrepreneurial course, creating a working business plan that I put into action. Within three years, Bowers had grown over 75 percent, added two employees, and redecorated the lobby.

Slowly, the neighborhood also improved. Community members began complaining to the council office and police department about the crime and lack of resources. In response, policing increased resulting in a raid of one of the largest dope houses in the area, which to my surprise was directly across the street. (There’s a bakery there now.) Shortly afterwards, Maxine Waters held a press conference on the corner of Adams and Central, declaring that we wouldn’t tolerate any more violence and unrest in our community.

We didn’t. On our block, I had pay telephone stands used by drug dealers removed, while sweeping and repainting. I had a local graffiti artist paint a mural on the side of the building to discourage other graffiti. Residents and business owners developed neighborhood watch groups and worked with the Community Police Advisory Board. When the local police division moved from Newton Street, which was above Washington, down to 35th Street on the Avenue, the community welcomed their presence.

But the biggest shift was the sea change of residents. South Central was largely an African American community. Over time, many of these longtime residents relocated to other areas of Los Angeles in search of employment and a better quality of life, some passed away, and unfortunately, some went to prison. By 1997 the area was 75 percent Latino and most of the small businesses along the South Central corridor were owned and operated by Latinos. I eventually added staff who were bilingual—I only had so much Spanish from my days at L.A. High.

We also benefited from public and private investment and more attention from our city council office under the leadership of Jan Perry. The vacant lot in the block next to ours (once a super market) was acquired and developed as a mixed-use property with affordable housing and retail space on the street level. Several other senior and affordable housing units soon followed. A shopping center with a grocery store and other services was developed on 20th and Central. A city moratorium on new fast-food places and liquor stores also created space for new kinds of businesses to develop.

Councilwoman Perry built a constituent service center in the 4200 block of Central Avenue—a beautiful LEED-certified building with rooftop space that is great for public use. And our store and several other businesses took advantage of the city’s façade improvement program to beautify our storefronts. The rehab of the Somerville Apartments and of the Dunbar Hotel, the latter famous as a venue during South Central’s jazz heyday, also gave us a lift.

I was fortunate that God sent me a wonderful husband, Greg Cowan, in 1997. He is now fondly called Mr. Bowers in our community! Initially, he’d come down to the plant after work and help me close the shop and service machinery. And after he got laid off from JPL in 1999, he filled in as the delivery driver. I couldn’t let him go! I needed every bit of his help; I was working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and barely getting a couple full days off per year. He’s helped me survive recessions and the 2008-09 credit crunch, when small businesses had their credit lines pulled. Currently we have nine employees, we are eco-friendly, and we have three computerized point of sale stations. We continue to provide quality, affordable service, and “A Personal Touch.”

Greg and I have become my parents!

Location – and delivery – have seen us through. Our business succeeds because we are less than a mile from the growth and development downtown. We provide dry-cleaning and laundry service to lofts and private residences within a 10 mile radius, corporate clients such as the L.A. Music Center, Los Angeles Convention Center, MTA, various departments at USC, and the Department of Homeland Security. Today, more than 70 percent of our business comes from such routes.

The other businesses in the Bowers Retail Complex are long-term tenants including a dentist, a soccer store, and a computer repair shop, which have all been here for more than 10 years. There’s also a tattoo supply store and a corner store, Amigos Variety, which has been there forever. The newest, A Taste of ChiBas Café, is my mom’s catering kitchen, which she now leases out to qualified licensed caterers.

For several years, members of the Central Avenue Business Association worked on beautification and cleanliness, business growth and development, and safety and parking concerns. When we first discussed the Business Improvement District, it seemed like a strange idea. We were already paying taxes for these services, so why should we send more money to the city? When we researched other BIDs we realized it was a way to maintain high standards and reach our goals. In May 2014, we formed a steering committee, hired consultants, and started the 18-month formation process. The BID of property owners was officially established on December 6, 2015 with a 78.65 percent yes vote. We’ve already hired our Clean Streets Team to power wash the streets, remove graffiti, empty trash cans, remove bulky items, and weed the tree wells. By August, we will have our Safety Ambassador Team on board. Businesses on neighboring corridors have already begun to ask how they can develop their own BID!

I’m thrilled with the BID. It’s added to what I call the improvement moment on the Avenue and in South Los Angeles in general. A variety of projects are currently underway. Meta Housing, which developed the lot next door, has another project in progress on Washington Boulevard. A Place Called Home, a terrific nonprofit focused on children and the arts, is expanding. The city has an interesting pilot program to help some of the small businesses here digitize their operations, so that it will be easier for them to grow.

And I’m very excited about the new, very nice sit-down restaurant that should open early next year in the Hotel Dunbar. (Cross your fingers).

Some things are becoming harder. Homelessness has become a much bigger problem in our area, as the development downtown pushes more people south. And there’s the concern that all the growth and development will displace both people and businesses. How do we welcome the new without pushing out the old?

The good news is that on South Central, we are in a much stronger position to deal with these hard questions.

The post The Little Dry Cleaning Shop Around the Corner appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At last estimate, Los Angeles’ population topped 3.9 million. In 1850, when the city was first incorporated, approximately 1,600 people lived here. In the last 165 years L.A.’s size and population have changed in almost every conceivable way.

But this growth hasn’t been accompanied by growth in our aspirations for being represented by public officials who know us and our concerns firsthand. Indeed, our aspirations in this political arena—our aspirations to be fairly represented and to prevent the concentration of power—may have atrophied. Los Angeles, through so much change, stubbornly remains a place designed to defeat those who might accumulate power and wield it.

Since the city’s first charter was put into effect in 1889, Angelenos have set up a system of government based on the desire to contain and diffuse power, and to protect ourselves from officeholders. The result is that it has long been hard to tell who is in charge. Power is purposefully spread out between the mayor, the city attorney and the city controller, and the 15-member city council.

Los Angeles first created a council and office of the mayor in 1850. Decades later, the 1889 charter established the practice of electing a city councilmember to each of nine wards. 1909 marked the beginning of at-large elections in Los Angeles and of non-partisan elections, in which candidates are elected without regard to their party preference. Both changes were largely reactions to widespread corruption and distrust of party politics, two sentiments that persist more than a century later. At-large elections, in which officials were elected to represent the entire city, not one district, continued for 16 years and non-partisan elections continue to this day.

Voters approved significant changes to the charter in 1925; the charter did away with at-large elections for the nine city council members and created a 15-member city council in which each member is elected to represent one district. Ninety years and 3 million more people later, today’s government still resembles that 1925 version. At the time, approximately 600,000 people lived in the city of Los Angeles, and each councilmember represented about 40,000 residents. Today, each councilmember represents 260,000 Angelenos—about 6 ½ times the number a councilmember represented in 1925.

The city council attempted to make bold changes to the charter in the early 1970s, but all they succeeded in doing was adding power for one group of officials and taking it away for others.

In 1999, at the end of a decade in which city government seemed powerless in response to riots and the San Fernando Valley sought to secede from the city, L.A. city voters approved a charter that strengthened the power of the mayor and created a system of neighborhood councils in an effort to increase civic participation across the city. It was largely an acknowledgment of L.A.’s size and diversity. It was also a concession that 15 city councilmembers could not be appropriately responsive to the needs of such a large city.

At the time, city councilmembers each had approximately 240,000 residents in their districts. But the voters rejected measures to give themselves more representation and enlarge the size of the city council. Angelenos were apparently united in their desire not to increase the number of our elected officials, a desire that remains firmly in place today, 16 years after we comprehensively reformed the charter.

It’s enough to make one ask whether Angelenos have any aspiration for political representation at all. Los Angeles currently has the highest councilmember-to-resident ratio in the country and one of the lowest percentages of voter turnout in local elections. In our most recent city elections, approximately 9 percent of those registered to vote did so. In the election prior to that, in 2013, just over 20 percent of registered voters showed up to the polls despite a competitive mayoral election.

And less than half of eligible voters bother to register. That means a city councilmember can be elected with about 13,000 votes—just 5 percent of their district.

Angelenos have created a “voting class” which picks our representatives for us. Ironically, a city built and structured on a distrust of power is ceding an enormous amount of power to those few people who choose to weigh in on local elections.

Many Angelenos may say they want elected officials to represent us fairly and be responsive to our needs. But how can they do this well when each member represents over a quarter million residents? And why should they when they know only a small segment of those residents will determine whether they can keep their jobs?

As we created and later reformed our system of city government, we worried about putting too much power in any one individual or governing body. Now, as a result of our own apathy, we have put too much power in a select few.

It’s past time for Los Angeles to put a new aspiration on the agenda—more and better representation in the life of the city. And that requires increasing the number of politicians in local government. It may also require looking at other ways to increase voter turnout, like automatic voter registration (which was just passed on the state level), implementing early voting, and creating voter centers that are open for weeks before an election. It is time for at least a few of the people in office to know our names.

The post Angelenos Never Much Cared About Local Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The answer is almost certainly yes. Compared to people in other states, few Californians talk to their neighbors and work together with them to solve local problems. But the most natural forums to meet with neighbors on community challenges—local meetings of the city council or school boards—aren’t designed to encourage conversation among citizens.

Walk into a council chamber or school board meeting room in your town, and you’ll likely see rows of chairs facing some sort of raised dais or stage, where the council members or board members sit. (Check out images of city council meetings around L.A. County here.) The whole point of the setup is to have you look at the politicians, not your fellow citizens. Essentially, city council chambers are laid out like church, and, as in church, you’re not supposed to talk too much. So it’s not surprising that fewer and fewer Americans bother to go to city council meetings (or, for that matter, to church).

So where do people go? They go to places where they feel comfortable, where they can eat and drink, where tables and chairs are arranged in ways that encourage conversation, In my San Gabriel Valley community, there are so many people spending time sitting and talking at the three local Starbucks that it’s often hard to get a table. Great bars and restaurants always seem full. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to find an empty seat at our local ice cream parlor, Fosselman’s in Alhambra.

Rarely have I had this problem at city council or school board meetings.

Ask yourself if the following sounds like how public meetings are conducted in your community: The big decisions are made in closed session, and when the council or board members face a difficult challenge, they spend most of the time sniping and immersed in personal rivalries. The written agendas handed out are long, but the descriptions of what’s being discussed are too brief and legalistic to be understood. Turnout among citizens is low, unless something has made the public mad, and so many angry people show up that it’s impossible to conduct a useful meeting. And those who come to speak tend to be regulars—many of whom are nutty gadflies. (They prove the municipal wisdom that that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who don’t go to council meetings, and those who go and probably shouldn’t.)

In my experience as a reporter, meaningful conversations between citizens do sometimes take place during meetings, but this talk occurs in corners, just outside the chambers in the hallway, or in common space. I’ve learned a lot from listening to the whispers back and forth in the open space at the very back of the L.A. Council chambers. When I visited the Clovis school board last year, a few parents talked about a problem teacher as they stood in the back right corner, along a wall, out of earshot of the people sitting in front. At Santa Monica’s council meetings, many people don’t go into the council chambers—but instead sit outside and watch on video feeds so they can talk with their fellow citizens.

This is the point in the column when earnest Bay Area types jump on Twitter to tell us that they are developing cool new technologies to help citizens engage their local government online. But precious little thought has been given to how to revitalize local government meetings themselves. To unleash the untapped power of council and school board meetings—to make them about creating conversations—we must flip our priorities and redesign the spaces, so that council chambers and boardrooms are foremost places for people to gather and talk.

What does that look like? Well, it looks like Starbucks. Take out the old fixed benches and seating of your council chamber. Set up tables and chairs and nice couches. Have a bar for serving coffee and healthy snacks and maybe even beer and wine. (I’m a teetotaler, but I don’t know how an elected official could summon the courage to grapple with California cities’ outsized pension problems without a slug of Jim Beam.)

And then take the council or board members off the dais and put them in a corner of the chambers—the way you might position a piano player in a hotel lobby. They’d be miked just loud enough that anyone in the room could hear them, but not so loud as to overwhelm any conversations.

If any council or board dared to try something like this, it would be broadly popular, but would raise all kinds of hackles among people like me—civic types and journalists. Too many of us treat local government as if it were a civic religion, and civic organizations, in the name of defending public access, often fight in court to protect the current, regulated system of church-like public gatherings. So we should loosen up. California is way too interesting to have its public meetings governed by stuffy Yankee mores.

It’s time to make our public meetings as comfortable as your favorite coffee shop. Imagine grabbing a drink, putting your feet up, and tuning out the re-zoning hearing in the corner while you and your neighbor trade gossip, and maybe figure out how to turn that vacant lot into a community garden.

The post Make Your City Council Meetings Feel Like a Starbucks appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A final photo shows a familiar alternative setting for meetings of all kinds—of friends, of dates, of business partners: a coffee shop. The photo of Intelligentsia, in the L.A. neighborhood of Silver Lake, shows life and connections that are pretty much impossible to find at your local city council meeting. If only council meetings could breathe in more of the flavor of café. Zócalo California editor Joe Mathews offers his thoughts and suggestions on how that might work.

The post These Chambers Don’t Welcome You appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.